Attack of the Quechup Fem Bots!

Most social networks grow through people finding friends or people they relate to. In some cases, people will friend others solely for the purpose of expanding their reach and exposure (usually for marketing purposes). But what happens when the friending is a result of the service itself and not overzealous or spammy users? The result is a steady, constant flow of friend requests from attractive women, day after day, after day, after day…

This has been exactly the case with the social network Quechup. Since creating my account several months ago, I’ve received on average about 2-3 friend requests per day — all from attractive women. Keep in mind that other than filling out my profile, I haven’t done one thing on their site. There’s also a peculiar thing about all of the friend requests — all of the users are “Premium” users. That of course means that if I want to fully interact with them, I’m encouraged to become a Premium user myself.

I can help but think that’s there’s one of two things going on here. My first assumption is that there is a team of paid employees that are managing all of these user profiles, all of which get sent automatically to users that match certain demographics. My second assumption is that is that these are real people, but they’re being incentivized to send out requests. There’s probably a built in cap on how many requests can be sent out to any particular user per day and the users making the request are probably getting compensated in an affiliate-like manner.

Whatever the cause is, it’s consistent and frequent. That’s why I made the Fem Bot collage to help you fully grasp the enormity and frequency of this campaign. I put together all of the avatars from all of the requests I’ve received from Quechup since April 28, 2008. They are listed in order, oldest to newest, top to bottom. You will notice that I received multiple requests from the same user on several occasions.

Tell us what you think

Jon Henshaw

Haha, that’s freaky. You never know. Google may be following you around!

http://www.designdirector.nl Michiel Ebberink

Very funny. I have the same thing. Just googled if Iwas the only

But you want to knwo what’s weird? A couple of days I signed up for your seo service. Didn’t know about ti before… Makes you wonder if it is a coincidence or google likes to mess with the results because i’ve visited your site before.